Walter Mosley: 'Devil in a Blue Dress'

Author: Lennard, John

Walter Mosley, a favourite author of President Bill Clinton, is the most important African-American writer of crime fiction since Chester B. Himes. Three formats: PDF, ePub and Mobi.

Mosley's novels chronicling the investigations of Easy Rawlins chart Californian history from 1948, echoing Chandler (and John D. MacDonald) while challenging Ellroy's L.A. Quartet. He has also written other crime and SF novels, Young Adult fiction, a memoir, and activist non-fiction, and is widely involved in cultural and educational projects promoting writing by people of colour.

THE BOOK

Devil in a Blue Dress is the first novel in Mosley's outstanding 'Easy' Rawlins series. The Notes provide an overview of Mosley's career and the series, give historical and literary backgrounds to the novel (including Chandler, Himes, Pinkerton Men and Private Eyes, Hollywood's Gumshoes, and the 'GI Bill'), and consider the film adaptation of Devil. Chapter by chapter Annotations detail allusions, slang, musical references, flora and fauna, and fashion, while disentangling Mosley's real and fictive Los Angeles. The Essay is 'In the Mortgage of his Skin', and uses Walcott's and Lamming's great phrase to ask about Easy's purest passion, the house that is his castle. The Bibliography covers all Mosley's work, with critical material on him and on (African-American) crime writing.

About the author

John Lennard took his B.A. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, and his M.A. at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught in the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame, and for the Open University, and as Professor of British & American Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona. He now teaches in Cambridge. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2/e, OUP, 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002), and the Literature Insights Hamlet (2007). He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Genre Fiction Monographs series, and has written several Sightlines titles, and two critical collections, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (2007); Of Sex and Faerie: Further Essays on Genre Fiction (2010).

Other Formats

Also available to library subscribers in Pdf format from MyiLibrary.com

Also available in Kindle format for hand-held devices from the Amazon Kindle Stores